Posted on 07/27/2009 2:33:10 PM PDT by freedommom
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is going to court to try to overturn about 100,000 default judgments he claims were improperly obtained against consumers — including more than 6,000 in Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties.
The lawsuit, filed this week in state Supreme Court in Erie County, names as defendants 35 law firms and two debt collection agencies who relied on a Long Island company, American Legal Process, to notify consumers they faced debt-
related lawsuits.
According to Cuomo's office, ALP failed to properly serve consumers with legal papers and provided fraudulent affidavits of service.
Many consumers never found out they were being sued until they found their bank accounts frozen or had their wages garnished, Cuomo said. Those suits were filed between January 2007 and October 2008.
The average judgment was $5,474. There were 2,508 judgments awarded in Orange County, 1,030 in Sullivan County and 2,528 in Ulster County.
The lawsuit is the latest step in the attorney general's ongoing investigation into fraudulent process serving and debt collection in the state.
http://www.recordonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090727/NEWS/907270314
Guess Cuomo wasn’t getting his cut!
This practice is called “sewer service”, meaning that unscrupulous process servers would take the summons issued by a court clerk, throw them down the sewer or otherwise into the trash, and then swear out affidavits that the process was in fact served on the defendant(s) named in the civil complaint.
I had a law professor many years ago who hailed from Brooklyn, and he pointed out in one of his lectures on real property that this was a common practice in eviction cases there.
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